Yale's Bestiary Of Grotesques, Gargoyles

PLACE

One of many sculptures and gargoyles that adorn the buildings at Yale University… (Mathew M. Duman )

October 23, 2013

By PHILIP LANGDON | PLACE

What facet of a building is most effective at making you smile? Is it expert craftsmanship? Handsome materials? Pleasing proportions?

For Mathew M. Duman, the answer is: gargoyles and grotesques. Five years ago, Duman, a photographer and graphic designer at the Knights of Columbus headquarters in New Haven, became fascinated with creatures that had been carved into walls, arches, cornices and towers of Yale University buildings.

Staring down at him from the Old Art Gallery on Chapel Street, Duman noticed pigs, dogs, squirrels and monkeys. Next door, on Street Hall, he spied turtles, tigers and crustaceans. On the York Street building where the Yale Daily News is produced, he saw a scholarly bulldog writing with a quill pen, and he observed a man — perhaps Briton Hadden, long ago chairman of the paper and co-founder of Time magazine — with his feet in stirrups, gleefully riding a mule.

For three years, Duman photographed sculptures and carvings such as those — first as "a fun hobby," later with growing seriousness and a better camera. In 2011, he collected his photos, along with stories about the carvings, into a 189-page book with the unusual title "An Education in the Grotesque: The Gargoyles of Yale University." Recently he started giving public presentations, which is how I came to hear him speak at the New Haven public library and to accompany him on a campus tour.

About his book's title: A "grotesque," as Duman defines it, is a depiction of a human or animal, sometimes "distorted to the point of caricature." A gargoyle (from the French word "gargouille," meaning throat) is a specific type of grotesque — one that's been designed to channel water off a roof. Gargoyles are plentiful at Yale. In snowy weather, if you're observant, you'll see pigs, owls, monkeys and other creatures with icicles hanging from their mouths. Greatly outnumbering the gargoyles are grotesques that don't drain any roofs but that do make the architecture more lighthearted.

A horned devil with a reptile-like tail perches on the roof of the Trumbull College master's house. Screaming eagles defend Vanderbilt Hall. The arched main entry of the Hall of Graduate Studies is ornamented with mostly unsmiling male faces with oversized ears. Patrick L. Pinnell's masterly "Yale University: The Campus Guide," a second edition of which was published this year by Princeton Architectural Press, says those somber heads are caricatures of graduate school dignitaries.

On Yale Law School, there are professors, judges and others with exaggerated, animal-like heads. There's a teacher lecturing students who have fallen asleep at their desks. And there's a thief with a stolen string of pearls, being captured at gunpoint by a policeman. Scattered across the campus are numerous heads of the university mascot: scholarly bulldogs wearing eyeglasses, athletic bulldogs wearing football helmets, injured bulldogs wearing bandages, and so on.

One of my favorites, though, is an antelope-like animal that's usually shown having a spotted coat and a pair of horns that swivel independently — one horn often points forward while the other points backward. Curious about these graceful yet peculiar animals, Duman consulted the university's Manuscripts and Archives and learned that he had discovered a "yale"— a mythical creature first described by Pliny the Elder in a Roman encyclopedia around 77 A.D. (In Latin, yale is "eale.")

Grotesques seem to have arrived at Yale in 1842, on Dwight Hall, Yale's first Gothic Revival building, and to have continued up through the 1930s, when the university's infatuation with Gothic styling was reaching the end of its run. It would be hard to imagine a modern building adorned with grotesques. Modernism has been too strait-laced for this sort of thing. Fortunately, "An Education in the Grotesque" ($29.95 at http://www.yalegargoyles.com) harbors no such resistance to ornament.

The book is self-published, and has some of the imperfections common to self-publishing. I wish that a number of the photos — the entire book is in black and white — were crisper. Nonetheless, Duman's book is a lot of fun; it takes readers on an enjoyable trip across a campus where imagination has repeatedly flourished. Gargoyles and grotesques ensure that every walk through Yale can show you something humorous or surprising — something that just might brighten your day.

Philip Langdon of New Haven is a contributing editor for the newsletter Better! Cities & Towns.